Foust, a former intelligence analyst, had asserted that
Snowden's leaks, while valuable in exposing encroachment on civil
liberty, also jeopardized legitimate security concerns. Quickly,
he found his site bombed with negative comments from Greenwald
supporters. Greenwald himself got in on the mix, implying
over Twitter that Foust was secretly working for the government.

Despite the backlash, Foust has continued to offer a nuanced
analysis of the NSA leaks — and no, he doesn't work for the
government.

He holds a nuanced view of Greenwald, too: "Fundamentally, we
agree on a lot of things," he tells Business Insider.

Indeed, Foust immediately recognized the significance of
Greenwald's initial report about the NSA scooping reams of
domestic telephony metadata via Verizon, a practice that
legally circumvents the 4th Amendment through the business
records provision.

"The Verizon metadata story is one, that one has caused me the
most concern, for both the government’s conduct, and our own
understanding of how much we’re being watched," Foust
says. "Clearly [the NSA is] engaging in massive surveillance
of American citizens. Saying they're not engaging in
surveillance of Americans is a lie."

But Foust also recognized a subtle distinction that is lost on
many supporters of Greenwald and Snowden, if not Greenwald and
Snowden themselves. As he wrote on
June 6:

In a normative sense, such an unusually broad act of surveillance
is beyond the pale — or at least, probably should be.
The reality, though, is that what the NSA did is perfectly legal.
Moreover, Congress even went out of its way to keep the legal
justification for it a secret.

The problem isn’t that the NSA is obeying the law: the law itself
is the problem. And no matter the public outcry now, we not only
supported that law when it was being created, we probably won’t
change anything now that its most extreme practices are being
exposed.

It's in the days and weeks following the Verizon piece that
Greenwald and Foust started to differ.

Bamboozled by Snowden

Protesters sporting
Snowden masks.REUTERS

Things got "bizarre" when Snowden identified himself, according
to Foust, as suddenly the story was all about him.

Snowden proclaimed that he left the U.S. because he "didn't want
to live in a society" that surveilled its citizens, all from a
hotel in Hong Kong, which Foust called one of "the most heavily
surveilled" cities on the planet. Soon, in an attempt to
"ingratiate
himself" to a Chinese government under pressure to extradite
him, Snowden leaked
IP addresses of NSA targets in China to the South China
Morning Post.

At that point, Foust says, Snowden "lost of all his standing to
be considered a whistleblower."

After all, spying on China should be a legitimate action of the
U.S. government.

"It’s silly to pretend like they’re not a rival government.
Massive amounts of government and corporate breaches come from
Russia and China, on incredibly sensitive targets," Foust says.

“He’s a kid, I really think he’s a kid, I think he never
anticipated this would be such a big matter in Hong Kong,” said
Mr. Albert Ho, one of Snowden's lawyers. “He enjoys Pepsi, he
prefers Pepsi to wine, that’s why I say he’s a kid.”

"Really Important Inaccuracies"

Greenwald's reporting since the Verizon story has been criticized
by journalists, tech professionals, and former government
insiders.

When Greenwald
reported about a program called XKeyscore based on a leaked
NSA presentation, he presented it as a secret and said that it
collected "nearly everything a user does on the
Internet." But this wasn't right, as experts soon pointed
out. Marc Ambinder clarified
in The Week that the program was designed to
surf already gathered information and it was not a secret at all,
since Ambinder had
written about it in his book years earlier.

Foust pointed out to Greenwald several times that the slides from
Greenwald's report were from 2009, prior to the 2011 FISA Act
amendment which curtailed certain NSA practices. Notably,
Greenwald's entire report
was in present tense, as if the slides reflected up-to-date
practices.

"He refused to engage with fairly reasonable questions, when did
these slides come from and where did these screenshots come
from," says Foust.

Omission, Foust says, is one Greenwald's chief problems.

"He's pretty much proclaimed his intent is to unravel the intel
community," says Foust, "As an activist who's approach to
journalism is like a defense lawyer, I think if he had evidence
that there was sufficient oversight, he wouldn't publish that,
he's not going to allow contradictory evidence to get in the
way."

Foust points to Greenwald's reporting in
El Globo about NSA spying on the Brazilian government as a prime
example of trying to make a scandal out of something that isn't.

"Brazil operates its own massive domestic spying operation — a
detail Greenwald, who lives in Rio de Janeiro, leaves out of all
of his outraged writing about the NSA," Foust wrote
on Medium Sept. 4.

There are
strong indications that Brazil has its own domestic
spying program. There's also history that shows how Brazilian
intelligence agencies were caught
bugging their own heads of state — a far cry from
what the NSA is accused of doing.

Foust has also taken on the other journalists who published leaks
from Snowden.

"A large number of the violations (60%) come from human error and
'lack of due diligence,'" wrote
Foust Aug. 16 about Barton Gellman's Washington Post
article, one
which cited an NSA audit that showed "2,776" privacy
violations per year.

"Moreover," continued Foust, "buried deep in the linked report is
a graph showing the vast majority of violations were caught by
'automated alert.' It’s not entirely clear what that means, but
it is suggestive that the NSA has systems in place to catch
unauthorized or improper database queries."

"I mean, take LOVEINT,
for example," Foust tells us about NSA analysts who spied on
girlfriends, "It would be naive to pretend that privacy violation
doesn't happen, but, again, every agency on the planet has
unethical employees, what distinguishes them is how they respond
to that employee. What we haven't gotten a
good sense of is the NSA's tolerance for rule breakers, how
pervasive deliberate rule breaking is."

Foust wrote that Greenwald, "a very smart guy," knew
exactly what he was doing when he sent his husband to
carry illegally obtained Top Secret documents about U.K. signals
intelligence through the U.K.'s busiest airport: He was trying to
get attention.

"It’s a bit difficult to see why anyone would be surprised that
he would be at the very least questioned by British
authorities," wrote Foust on
his blog the day after the detention. "They would
have been negligent not to stop him."

Following this
criticism, Greenwald immediately
attacked Foust's character,
accusing him of being a government shill.

"It's because he goes after people who disagree like they're
mortal enemies," Foust says. "I don't like dealing with
defamation. I'm not financially gaining from this. I'm not fond
of being bullied. I'm perfectly fine with pushing back."

Foust did push back, pointing
out that Greenwald used the same tactic on him in 2010.

Foust also points to other victims of Greenwald's attacks.

"Look at what he did to [host] Mika Brzezinski. She simply asked
him what's illegal, and if there was evidence of any wrongdoing,
and he attacked her as a shill," Foust says of Greenwald's Morning
Joe appearance. "To me, that was the quintessential Glenn
Greenwald ... instead of engaging with the topic he attacked her
character."

"He treated it like a defense attorney," says Foust, "Instead of
arriving at the truth, instead of accounting for contradictory
information, or missing information, he attacks any disagreement
or question as evidence of malice and personally demonizes."

Foust contends that Greenwald applies a harsh double standard to
government workers, treating them as credible sources when useful
and dismissing them as shills when not.

"When someone tells him something he disagrees with, he assumes
that person is lying, looks for evidence that he is, or just
attacks their character," says Foust, "But when Snowden tells him
something, he doesn't assume he's lying and look for evidence to
the contrary."

Who is Foust anyway?

Foust had an inclination for international relations ever since
his family took him to St. Petersburg as a kid. After college,
he found his first real job with friends at a think tank. He
started as a receptionist, asked questions, pushed, and
eventually became a technical writer, then a full
consultant.

The piece was about how interpreters were important to
counterinsurgency operations but also about how they'd been
misused and sometimes even abused by their coalition
handlers. Unfortunately, someone in the chain of command had
a financial stake in interpreters, and that person was fuming.

"Only reason I didn't technically get fired is because we checked
with a senior government person that we (the company) interacted
with prior to writing the piece, and he gave the permission,"
says Foust.

He got lucky not long after, landing a decent contract with
the Defense Intelligence Agency, which required him to move to
D.C. and work in a Department of Defense office. Hired
as a political analyst, he wrote reports mostly about Yemeni
politics, but he says they gathered dust.

"They went unread because they weren't of strategic value at the
time," says Foust.

After taking a fellowship at a think tank called The American
Security Project, Foust bounced around, contributing to The
Atlantic as a foreign policy analyst and going in front of
Congress to testify about the horrific state of contractors in
Iraq and Afghanistan.

"I don't have a problem with contractors as if they're mysterious
creatures out to ruin civil liberties," Foust says. "[But] the
system itself doesn't function very well, there's no oversight,
and there's not a clear sense about why contractors shouldn't be
doing certain government services for profit."

Spoken like a true government shill.

"A common slur that people sling my way, they say I’m tied
to a secret magic interest. I don’t think they realize when these
organizations and people actually pay for those things, they
expect something of value back, not criticism," Foust says.

What next?

Foust says there are plenty of problems that should be
investigated in in the U.S. intelligence community, starting
with Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.

James
Clapper is the Director of National Intelligence, the commander
of all U.S. intel agencies.AP

"He will be a counterproductive presence until he leaves," says
Foust, "The one thing you don't do about oversight and compliance
is lie about it. I don't think Clapper can be a reliable narrator
in this story."

Foust also brought our attention back
to the DEA scandal reported by Reuters, where the Agency
was found to be tapping phones across America for the purpose of
drug arrests.

"The biggest weakness is the administration's response of 'just
trust us' when they've proven they can't be trusted," says Foust
in his own appeal for transparency, and yes, reform. "They need
to be clear about these programs, if not revealing, here's how
what we do has benefitted you, here's the cost it's imposed for
these benefits, whatever the tradeoffs are, they need to talk
about them."

Getting to the bottom of these secrets will require more facts.

As for evidence of abuse, Foust contends Greenwald either
does not have it or is for some reason withholding it.

"He's had those documents for months, where is the evidence?
Evidence of capability is not evidence of abuse."

Foust offers a few lines of advice for Greenwald:

"I wish I didn't have to fact check him, I'm sure plenty of other
people wish the same thing. Fact checking shouldn't be the
antithesis of Greenwald."

"He should interview actual experts in the fields that he's
talking about."

"Stop making it about the personalities who run these agencies,
instead show how they exist in law, and not that
they might, but how they actually
demonstrate misconduct."

"We don’t have much evidence that that is the case. If the
intelligence community is operating in constraints of the law,
but amorally, the only way to enlighten that is by discussing it
accurately, I have a problem with how inaccurately this has been
discussed."

"We both agree that there must be reform, if your concern is
changing the conduct of war and over-classification, there's a
sense that leaking is an acceptable shortcut to that, instead it
only serves to deepen secrecy, battling that means changing the
regulations, it takes presidential and congressional
leaders, writing laws."

"Drop the precious child act ... keep your head down, get out of
Russia as soon as possible, go out of your way to demonstrate for
the things you believe in, focus on the domestic surveillance
issue, that's the only way to generate public sympathy and
interest in your cause."